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Prefixes, suffixes and roots: Why morphology matters

Sound Waves Literacy 20/10/24

Which of the words below have more than one morpheme?

autobiography
stars
crocodile

If you answered all but crocodile, you’d be correct! But let’s find out why.

What is a morpheme?

A morpheme is the smallest unit of meaning within a language. Morphemes can be a whole word, part of a word or even a single letter. The word reporter has three morphemes: re + port + er. These three morphemes each influence the overall meaning of the word. The prefix re means back, the Latin root port means carry and the suffix er means one who. If we combine the meaning of each morpheme, we can derive that the word reporter means one who carries back information or news.

Morphemes are much more than word parts – they must always represent meaning. Some words contain smaller words but don’t have more than one morpheme. For example, the word stars has the two morphemes star + s, but the word start does not contain any smaller morphemes that contribute to its meaning, so it just has the one morpheme.

Morphemes come in various sizes. The number of sounds in a word does not determine the number of morphemes it has. The word crocodile has only one morpheme because it does not contain any smaller units of meaning, compared to the word dogs which has the two morphemes dog + s. This can also mean that sometimes a part of the word is a morpheme in some words, but not in others. For example, the prefix dis in dishonest is a morpheme that means not, whereas the word disco contains ‘dis’ but it does not contribute to the meaning of the word and is therefore not a morpheme.

What is morphology and morphemic knowledge?

The word morphology contains the Greek root ology, meaning study of, therefore morphology literally means the study of morphemes. It includes the explicit teaching of prefixes, suffixes, and Greek and Latin roots. Morphemic knowledge or morphemic awareness is the ability to recognise and manipulate morphemes. ¹ Students come to school with some morphemic knowledge already because of their early oral language development, but they still require explicit teaching of morphemes to connect their oral language vocabulary to spelling. Students also come to school with misconceptions about morphemes and will make generalisations (e.g. they may say taked instead of took) before they know the exceptions.

Good readers and spellers search for morphemes in new words to give clues about a word’s meaning. ² Morphemic awareness helps students recognise connections between words (e.g. act and action are connected), judge word relatedness (e.g. flow and flower are not related) and find morphemes within words (e.g. export has the two morphemes ex + port). This knowledge helps students derive the meaning of unknown words and spell words with familiar morphemes.

Why do we need to teach morphology?

English is a morphophonemic language, which means word construction is based on both phonemes and morphemes. Some words have consistent and predictable phoneme–grapheme relationships, like the word bug which has the grapheme b representing , u representing and g representing .

However, some words have unusual phoneme–grapheme relationships and this is usually because of their morphemes. The words seemed, jumped and landed all contain the suffix ed to show past tense. However, the suffix ed represents three different phonemes in each of these words. In the word seemed, the suffix ed represents . In jumped, the suffix ed represents and in landed, the suffix ed represents . These words could be incorrectly spelled seemd, jumpt and landid to match their phonemes but this would sever the morphological connection to past tense in the words. Instead, regardless of what phoneme we hear, if we want to represent past tense in regular verbs, we write the suffix ed.

The English spelling system may sacrifice a bit of consistency with phoneme–grapheme relationships, but in doing so it strengthens the link between spelling and meaning. About 80% of English words have more than one morpheme, so morphemic knowledge is extremely helpful for bolstering a student’s ability to read and spell. ¹

When should we start teaching morphology?

Research has long supported the explicit teaching of morphemes just like we explicitly teach phonics. We know morphemic knowledge enhances reading comprehension, word recognition, vocabulary and spelling.² For students to successfully read and spell, they should be taught morphemes in parallel with phonics.

Morphology instruction should follow a scope and sequence that aligns with the following principles:

1. Teach high-frequency and common morphemes first (e.g. suffixes such as ed, ing, s, er).
2. Prioritise teaching morphemes that are transparent and stable (e.g. the root tract means pull in words such as tractor, contract, retract).
3. Gradually introduce complex morphemes that change the phonemes or the spelling of base words (e.g. spelling and pronunciation changes occur when the suffix ion is added to words like create — creation, discuss — discussion, explode — explosion).

Sound Waves Literacy aligns with the new Australian Curriculum (Version 9.0), which includes morphology instruction from Foundation through to Year 6. In this new version of the curriculum, morphemic knowledge is prioritised in the achievement standard for Years 2–6. Sound Waves Literacy starts morphology instruction from Foundation with the explicit teaching of the suffix s for plurals. The Years F–6 Scope and Sequence outlines the progression of morphology instruction throughout all year levels.

References

1. Castles, A, Rastle, K & Nation, K 2018, ‘Ending the Reading Wars: Reading acquisition from novice to expert’, Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 19(1), 5–51.↩
2. Moats, L 2020, Speech to Print: Language Essentials for Teachers, Brookes Publishing Company. ↩

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